A new proposal has emerged to solve the teacher shortage crisis: to bring trainee teachers into classrooms six months after their training. The first image that came to many upon hearing this suggestion was of trembling, 19-year-olds crying helplessly in front of the savage classes of 9th graders.
But as a long-term educator, I give NSW Education Minister Sarah Mitchell three rounds of applause for promoting a national model of initial teacher education (ITE) that engages students as long-term “paraprofessionals” (it’s i.e. teaching assistants). in his first year of teaching. The new federal Education Minister, Jason Clare, has also expressed his support, calling a meeting of all ministers, some principals and other experts on August 12. This is not surprising: local educators like myself remember that within the first three months of being elected in 2007, he personally visited every school in his Blaxland constituency, public and private. His time has finally come.
To solve the teacher shortage crisis, trainee teachers will join classrooms six months after their training, according to NSW Education Minister Sarah Mitchell. Credit:
As the NSW Government is well aware, the on-the-job training model has worked brilliantly in various places around the country. Initially piloted as a community-based ‘teaching school’ in the large network of St Philip’s Christian College in the Hunter region, it is now five years on and has recently graduated the first cohort with a retention rate of 95% and currently 40 more. in training The model has expanded rapidly across the country, with seven “concentration model” teaching schools expected to be operational by 2023 (three centers were funded by Treasurer Dominic Perrottet in 2021).
This teaching school model – like a teaching hospital – basically selects students from the locality of the cluster of schools, hires them as teaching assistants one day a week under close supervision, with half the fees of tertiary subsidized by schools. They join the school family, as “clinical teachers”, as “clinical interns” in medical training.
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Both the school and the student work within three weeks of the first year of teaching if teaching is their government; forget about waiting until the third year. Although Minister Mitchell’s proposal waits six months before placement, it is great news as it proposes to scale the idea of ’clinical teaching’ to a national standard. Some other universities have made other variations on the “clinical teaching” theme in recent years.
But a word of caution: as part of the Alphacrucis University College team that co-designed the St Philip’s model, we’ve learned that ITE in the workplace is hard to do well, and it doesn’t come cheap. It requires four key elements that are not currently common.
First, universities need to work closely with local school groups and radically adjust their own rhythms, budgets and old working practices to suit the local rhythms of schools. For 800 years, it has been the opposite: the locals have had to adapt to the great Tertiary.
Second, our large state education departments must genuinely trust local school principals to run the program on the ground, on their own terms, in mutually aligned local clusters of schools. These schools must select who participates in the program; you can’t just ask principals to get head office to employ some random unknown ITE student as a teacher’s aide. For 150 years in NSW, this massive center has controlled everything from school budgets to schools. Teachers trained to teach “anywhere” are credentialed and sent out, only to find they have to teach “somewhere.” Many are ill-prepared for local needs and leave. And the current crisis in the supply of teachers shows that the center cannot sustain itself, the model has been collapsing for years. If the idea of ”clinical placement” becomes the national standard, and if ITE is standardized nationally, it must not be forgotten that one size does not fit all. Teachers must be prepared for different needs in different areas and, indeed, where appropriate, different school sectors.